Stitches of Love
For many years my mother has hand stitched true works of art in the form of a quilt, from laying out the basic pattern to selecting the colors from her endless source of scraps. Each stitch was made with a special dose of love.
As a Christmas present one year, she honored me with one of her handmade delights, a creation I found unique in more ways than expected. For several months all I could do was take it out and admire it on occasion. When mother asked how I liked the quilt, I told her that I wasn’t using it but stored it away in a box in the top of my closet. It seemed as if the phone line died, right after the outraged gasp. She insisted that she made the quilt to be used! I promised from that moment on that I’d take it out of the closet and use this treasure, which was the best way at that time to start mending her feelings.
Never having been much of a dreamer while sleeping, it seemed that shortly after I began dozing under the quilt, the frequency of my dreams increased and almost inevitably would have some relationship to my grandmother. She was an awesome lady and the best cook I ever encountered (she served the Morehouse Parish School Board as a cook until her retirement). The type person you could really talk to about anything, my grandmother would always have an ear for me anytime the need arose and her soothing generally came in the form of cake. Her death just a few years prior had really left a huge void in my life as well as most of the people she encountered in her life.
The dreams continued and during a phone call with mother, at the risk of her thinking I had completely lost my mind, I confided the recent flood of dreams about my grandmother. She gave a small sigh and asked if I could see the quilt from where I was sitting. She then requested that I look really hard at the quilt to determine if there was anything familiar about it. I tried but didn’t’ recognize anything right away. She then told me that when Grandmother passed away she took most of her clothes and cut them into quilt scraps. The quilt she painstakingly hand stitched were made from this harvest of material indebted to her by her mother.
What a special gift I received that Christmas. This also reinforced the belief that stitches of love can mend most anything and that their memories may fade, but can always be recalled with a nap on a lazy Saturday evening. Never underestimate the power of a mother’s, or grandmother’s love or at what lengths it may take for it to present itself.
© Keith Skinner - 2005 - All Rights Reserved - Originally Published in Louisiana Road Trips Magazine